Affirmative Action
Good piece, one that could only come from a faculty member who is safely retired...
Affirmative Action and Radical Politics
But the Comments are the part most worth reading. Some of the usual junk, of course, but mostly thoughtful and with many interesting reports of personal experience of affirmative action in diverse fields, inside and outside of higher education.
Affirmative action began as a good, necessary, and just idea that unfortunately was based on a false assumption. The good, necessary, and just idea was that there were talented, high-ability individuals in the society who had no chance at higher education due to economic circumstances and/or racial discrimination. That was bad for those individuals, whose talents were unfairly going to waste, and bad for the society, which lost the productivity of that talent. Affirmative action was to make the special efforts required to identify those individuals, and to provide them with educational opportunities commensurate with their talents and abilities.
The false assumption was that there existed a large amount of such unrecognized talent, especially in minority communities, waiting to be discovered and sped on its way to academic and professional success. There was some, but as it gradually became clear that no large pool of unrecognized talent actually existed, affirmative action became a racial-ethnic quota system in the business of trying to make silk purses out of sows' ears. When compensatory education programs proved unable to effect such transformations, the affirmative action game became what it is today, a phony, quota-driven credentialing system that tries to re-label sows' ears as silk purses on the false hope that nobody will notice. One result is unqualified individuals occupying positions that are not competent to fill. Another is for the qualifications of the genuinely talented, superbly competent minority doctor, lawyer, scholar to be viewed as suspect, presumed to be somewhat less than what they appear to be.
Byron
Affirmative Action and Radical Politics
But the Comments are the part most worth reading. Some of the usual junk, of course, but mostly thoughtful and with many interesting reports of personal experience of affirmative action in diverse fields, inside and outside of higher education.
Affirmative action began as a good, necessary, and just idea that unfortunately was based on a false assumption. The good, necessary, and just idea was that there were talented, high-ability individuals in the society who had no chance at higher education due to economic circumstances and/or racial discrimination. That was bad for those individuals, whose talents were unfairly going to waste, and bad for the society, which lost the productivity of that talent. Affirmative action was to make the special efforts required to identify those individuals, and to provide them with educational opportunities commensurate with their talents and abilities.
The false assumption was that there existed a large amount of such unrecognized talent, especially in minority communities, waiting to be discovered and sped on its way to academic and professional success. There was some, but as it gradually became clear that no large pool of unrecognized talent actually existed, affirmative action became a racial-ethnic quota system in the business of trying to make silk purses out of sows' ears. When compensatory education programs proved unable to effect such transformations, the affirmative action game became what it is today, a phony, quota-driven credentialing system that tries to re-label sows' ears as silk purses on the false hope that nobody will notice. One result is unqualified individuals occupying positions that are not competent to fill. Another is for the qualifications of the genuinely talented, superbly competent minority doctor, lawyer, scholar to be viewed as suspect, presumed to be somewhat less than what they appear to be.
Byron
posted by Byron | Sunday, March 25, 2012
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